FENIX 701

It took chipping away at it by the The Guardian, the New York Times, and others before the Washington Post blew the story wide open yesterday: “The mysterious strikes targeting multiple Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands this year were carried out as part of a covert CIA program.”

According to the WaPo, citing a source with knowledge, “the strikes were part of a ‘covert action’ program, a type of secret operation overseas that is approved by the president but where the role of the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledged.”

With the Pentagon denying any knowledge of or involvement with the strikes on three Ecuadorian fishing boats — one of which remains missing, with its crew presumed lost at sea — suspicion had focused on covert ops, private military contractors, or other Latin American governments as the likely culprits. The WaPo notes that the CIA involvement doesn’t rule out the other potential culprits: “It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.”

The crews of the two boats that survived the mystery attacks ended up in El Salvador before being repatriated to Ecuador, the WaPo reports. Both crews reported being “rescued” by a blue boat that may have been involved in the attacks. Most of the men aboard the blue boat spoke English, and wore uniforms with American flag patches, the NYT previously reported.

The program of covert strikes is separate and apart from the Pentagon’s lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats: “It is unclear why, as the Trump administration touts its military attacks against alleged drug boats, it would engage in a separate clandestine effort targeting vessels, said former U.S. officials who previously worked in the region.”

The WaPo covers similar ground as the NYT piece earlier this week, but adds additional details about the strikes on the Ecuadorian fishing boats and about a mystery aircraft flying out of El Salvador that it identifies as a Cessna Citation Longitude using the call sign “FENIX 701.” (Given its sordid history, the CIA’s use of “Phoenix” in a covert op today is either tone deaf or a deliberate middle finger.)

The plane flew from Tennessee to El Salvador in November, was photographed from the ground and via satellite at El Salvador’s Ilopango International Airport, was tracked in the vicinity of the Ecuadorian fishing boat strikes, and was last detected landing in San Antonio, Texas, in April.

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

The revelation that the CIA is behind the mystery boat strikes reminds of the conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on his podcast The Daily Blast:

I am really cognizant that we only know what we know, and that this administration has done myriad things to reduce transparency and accountability and ready access into what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

I’m thinking about things like the high-seas strikes on [alleged] drug smuggling boats. … I’m thinking special operations activities around the globe. I’m thinking other military actions or activities we might not know about. And I’m not suggesting some dark, hidden conspiracy, I just mean we don’t know. … I suspect that we may be spending the next several decades unearthing things that happened during this period that we just didn’t know about.

COINTELPRO II?

It’s going to take some time to expose the full scope and scale of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation into protesters of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. But we got the first glimpse yesterday in a court filing that included internal DHS documents among some of the discovery provided by the government to a group of protesters facing criminal charges.

As TPM’s Josh Kovensky details, the invasiveness of the investigation is striking. In addition to making extensive use of undercover informants, it targeted labor unions and left-leaning groups, including using administrative summons and/or subpoenas to access records of financial transactions by labor unions, in some instances stretching back years before the protests.

As the NYT put it: “As part of their inquiry, the documents show, homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• Houston: U.S. attorney Aaron Reitz confirmed that FBI tests didn’t find meth in the van being driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when he was fatally shot by ICE last month. The Trump DOJ made public its suspicion that the substance was meth before running any tests in what appeared to be a smear job to come up with an ex post facto political justification for the wrongful shooting.
• Tacoma: U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright awarded $5,498 in compensatory sanctions and $11,455 in attorney’s fees to an undocumented immigrant who was wrongfully transferred by ICE outside of her jurisdiction without notice twice, in what she found to be two willful violations of her court orders.
• Alien Enemies Act: The full 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the leading challenge to President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act after the administration deported the three Venezuelan men who originally filed the lawsuit using a different law. That left the case without plaintiffs, and the appeals court refused the request to substitute new plaintiffs who had been targeted under the AEA.

Good Read

TPM’s Emine Yücel: The new OLC memo purporting to expand executive privilege to private advisers to the president is a “devious tactic” to cover up Trump administration corruption ahead of a potential midterm victory for congressional Democrats.

What Happened in the Wisconsin Gov Race?

G. Elliott Morris goes under the hood on a poll that missed big on the results of the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor and concludes that it was the largely result of (i) assuming the electorate would be younger and more progressive than it turned out to be; and (ii) a late move by David Crowley that continued after the last polls were in the field.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

A state judge in Nevada threw out criminal charges over the 2020 fake electors scheme, ruling that Attorney General Aaron Ford “failed to present sufficient evidence from which a reasonable grand jury could infer the requisite intent to defraud.” Ford vowed to appeal.

The New Cold War

• WSJ: An Italian fighter jet under NATO auspices shot down a foreign drone that entered Latvian airspace early Friday. Latvia hadn’t determined the drone’s origin but suggested it may have been a Ukrainian drone deflected off course by Russian counter-drone measures.
• WaPo: Poland says it thwarted a Russian assassination attempt in Warsaw on an unidentified U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin.
• NYT: Inside Russia’s big push to destabilize the Western-leaning government of Moldova.

Just the Pettiest Shit Imaginable

The Trump-appointed board of the beleaguered Kennedy Center voted yesterday to sidestep a federal court order blocking it from renaming the performing arts institution for Donald Trump by:

• closing the Kennedy Center for two years for renovations and carving this inscription into the building’s white marble facade, just beneath the marquee with JFK Jr’s name: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump”;
• adding another line if an endowment fund named for Trump reaches $100 million: “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”
• renaming the physical site on which the center stands to “The President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

See Ya Monday

This is the last weekend of summer for a lot of folks. Make it memorable.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Axios reports that Donald Trump is pretty conspicuously declining to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel’s October election. I would be remiss I didn’t explicitly note that it is unprecedented and outrageous that a U.S. president is even considering a formal endorsement in the election of an allied country. They’ve often had preferences of course. But we used to have respect for the internal affairs of foreign governments, especially allied ones. In any case, we don’t now. And here we are.

This appears to be part of Trump’s deliberate move away from Israel and the closely related annoyance that Israel continues to complicate his other priorities, which are one part conventional geopolitics and one part corrupt deals with various Gulf States. But there’s another factor Axios points to which we’re familiar with from the U.S. endorsement game. Netanyahu’s polls look bad. And Trump doesn’t want to back a loser.

This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

In “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when Indiana Jones is asked how he intends to single-handedly stop a Nazi caravan he mutters, “I’m making this up as I go.” That improvisational approach by a signature Paramount hero appears to mirror that of the company’s current CEO David Ellison, as he stumbles through a conservative media takeover that feels more like the product of expediency than ideology.

The latest odd wrinkle in Ellison’s serialized pursuit of becoming one of media’s most influential figures — acquiring Paramount through Skydance Media, then engineering a pending $111 billion merger with a much larger studio, Warner Bros. Discovery — emerged this week. Frustrated by the thus-far effective efforts of state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, to delay or even derail the deal, Paramount officials privately floated the prospect of abandoning California if Ellison doesn’t get his way, administering a blow to the state’s economy.

Bonta quickly labeled the not-so-subtle threat “blackmail,” but like many of Ellison’s actions, there’s a sense nobody fully thought the logistics through in terms of relocating and how that would practically work. Since the Skydance deal closed a year ago, Paramount has been defined by chaos, potentially destroying traditional media outlets while cozying up to the Trump administration to secure its regulatory blessing.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) put out a new opinion earlier this week arguing that President Donald Trump can assert executive privilege over communications with advisors even if they do not work at the White House or within the government at all.

Experts tell TPM that the legal opinion is likely an effort from the Trump administration and his DOJ to preemptively interfere with congressional investigations that Democrats plan to launch if they manage to take control of one or both chambers after the 2026 midterms.

Here’s something to keep a close eye on. Mike Huckabee, who as part of Trump’s fun house diplomacy is now the U.S. ambassador to Israel, went on X yesterday and called the siege of a Palestinian family’s West Bank home by a group of Israeli settlers a “horrific act of terror.”

Now what’s happening there is that and worse. In many ways, what’s been happening in the West Bank for the last year and a half is worse than what is happening in Gaza, though the death toll is orders of magnitude less. But this doesn’t sound like Huckabee. He’s one of the biggest supporters of the settler movement and the most violent and nationalistic parts of it.

So what’s up here?

A Nebulous Strategy

I’ve been operating under the assumption that the Trump administration’s interest in cracking down on “fraud” in how states spend federal funding that is dispersed for programs like Medicaid, Medicare and the federal nutrition program SNAP was just another excuse to punish President Trump’s critics and perceived political foes.